Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  This was around the time when he was writing In the Heart of the Country.

  He was just completing In the Heart of the Country.

  Did you know that In the Heart of the Country would be about madness and parricide and so forth?

  I had absolutely no idea.

  Did you read it before it was published?

  Yes.

  What did you think of it?

  [Laughs.] I must tread carefully. I presume you do not mean, what was my considered critical judgment, I presume you mean how did I respond? Frankly, I was at first nervous. I was nervous that I would find myself in the book in some embarrassing guise.

  Why did you think that might be so?

  Because – so it seemed to me at the time, now I realize how naïve this was – I believed you could not be closely involved with another person and yet exclude her from your imaginative universe.

  And did you find yourself in the book?

  No.

  Were you upset?

  What do you mean – was I upset not to find myself in his book?

  Were you upset to find yourself excluded from his imaginative universe?

  No. I was learning. My exclusion was part of my education. Shall we leave it at that? I think I have given you enough.

  Well, I am certainly grateful to you. But, Mme Denoël, let me make one further appeal. Coetzee was never a popular writer. By that I do not simply mean that his books did not sell widely. I also mean that the public never took him to their collective heart. There was an image of him in the public realm as a remote and supercilious intellectual, an image he did nothing to dispel. Indeed one might even say he encouraged it.

  Now, I don’t believe that image does him justice. The conversations I have had with people who knew him well reveal a very different person, not necessarily warmer in temperament but more unsure of himself, more confused, more human, if I can use that word.

  I wonder if you would be prepared to comment on the human side of him. I value what you have said about his politics, but are there stories of a more personal nature that you would be prepared to share, stories that might shed a better light on his character?

  You mean stories that would show him in a more attractive, more endearing light – stories of kindness towards animals, for instance, animals and women? No, stories like that I will be saving for my own memoirs.

  [Laughter.]

  All right, I will tell you one story. It may not seem all that personal, it may again seem to be political, but you must remember, in those days politics thrust its way into everything.

  A journalist from Libération, the French newspaper, came on an assignment to South Africa, and asked whether I could set up an interview with John. I went back to John and persuaded him to accept: I told him Libération was a good paper, I told him French journalists were not like South African journalists, they would never arrive for an interview without having done their homework.

  We held the interview in my office on the campus. I thought I would assist in case there were language problems, John’s French was not good.

  Well, it soon became clear that the journalist was not interested in John himself but in what John could tell him about Breyten Breytenbach, who was at the time in trouble with the South African authorities. Because in France there was a lively interest in Breytenbach – he was a romantic figure, he had lived in France for many years, he had connections in the French intellectual world.

  John’s response was that he could not help: he had read Breytenbach but that was all, he did not know him personally, had never met him. All of which was true.

  But the journalist, who was used to literary life in France, where everything is so much more incestuous, would not believe him. Why would one writer refuse to comment on another writer from the same little tribe, the Afrikaner tribe, unless there was some personal grudge between them or some political animosity?

  So he kept pressing John, and John kept trying to explain how hard it was for a foreigner, an outsider, to appreciate Breytenbach’s achievement as a poet, since his poetry was so deeply rooted in the volksmond, the language of the people.

  ‘Are you referring to his dialect poems?’ said the journalist. And then, when John failed to understand, he remarked, very disparagingly, ‘Surely you would agree one cannot write great poetry in dialect.’

  That remark really infuriated John. But, since his way of being angry was, rather than shouting and creating a scene, to turn cold and retreat into silence, the man from Libération was nonplussed. He had no idea of what he had provoked.

  Afterwards, when John had left, I tried to explain that Afrikaners became very emotional when their language was insulted, that Breytenbach himself would probably have responded in the same way. But the journalist just shrugged. It made no sense, he said, to write in dialect when one had a world language at one’s disposal (actually he didn’t say a dialect, he said an obscure dialect, and he didn’t say a world language, he said a proper language, une vraie langue). At which point it began to dawn on me that he was putting Breytenbach and John in the same category, as vernacular or dialect writers.

  Well, of course John did not write in Afrikaans at all, he wrote in English, very good English, and had written in English all his life. Even so, he responded in the prickly fashion I have described to what he saw as an insult to the dignity of Afrikaans.

  He did translations from Afrikaans, didn’t he? I mean, translated Afrikaans writers.

  Yes. He knew Afrikaans well, I would say, though in much the same fashion as he knew French, that is, better on the page than spoken. I was not competent to judge his Afrikaans, of course, but that was the impression I got.

  So we have the case of a man who spoke the language only imperfectly, who stood outside the national religion or at least the state religion, whose outlook was cosmopolitan, whose politics was – what shall we say? – dissident, yet who was prepared to embrace an Afrikaner identity. Why do you think that was so?

  My opinion is that under the gaze of history he felt there was no way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically.

  Was there nothing that drew him more positively to embrace an Afrikaner identity – nothing at a more personal level, for example?

  Perhaps there was, I can’t say. I never got to meet his family. Perhaps they would provide a clue. But John was by nature very cautious, very much the tortoise. When he sensed danger, he would withdraw into his shell. He had been rebuffed by the Afrikaners too often, rebuffed and humiliated – you have only to read his book of childhood memories to see that. He was not going to take the risk of being rejected again.

  So he preferred to remain an outsider.

  I think he was happiest in the role of outsider. He was not a joiner. He was not a team player.

  You say you were never introduced to his family. Did you not find that strange?

  No, not at all. His mother had passed away by the time he and I met, his father was not well, his brother had left the country, he was on strained terms with the wider family. As for me, I was a married woman, therefore our relationship, as far as it went, had to be clandestine.

  But he and I talked, of course, about our families, our origins. What distinguished his family, I would say, is that they were cultural Afrikaners but not political Afrikaners. What do I mean by that? Reflect for a moment on the Europe of the nineteenth century. All over the continent you see ethnic or cultural identities transforming themselves into political identities. That process commences in Greece and spreads rapidly through the Balkans and central Europe. Before long the wave hits the colonies. In the Cape Colony, Dutch-speaking Creoles begin to reinvent themselves as a separate nation, the Afrikaner nation, and to agitate for national independence.

  Well, somehow or other that wave of romantic nationalist enthusiasm passed John’s family by. Or else they decided not
to swim with it.

  They kept their distance because of the politics associated with nationalist enthusiasm – I mean, the anti-imperialist, anti-English politics?

  Yes. First they were disturbed by the whipped-up hostility to everything English, by the mystique of Blut und Boden; then later they recoiled from the ideological baggage that the nationalists took over from the radical right in Europe – scientific racism, for example – and the policies that went with it: the policing of culture, militarization of the youth, a state religion, and so forth.

  So, all in all, you see Coetzee as a conservative, an anti-radical.

  A cultural conservative, yes, as many of the modernists were cultural conservatives – I mean the modernist writers from Europe who were his models. He was deeply attached to the South Africa of his youth, a South Africa which by 1976 was starting to look like a never-never land. For proof you have only to turn to the book I mentioned, Boyhood, where you find a palpable nostalgia for the old feudal relations between white and Coloured. To people like him, the National Party with its policy of apartheid represented not backwoods conservatism but on the contrary new-fangled social engineering. He was all in favour of the old, complex, feudal social textures which so offended the tidy minds of the dirigistes of apartheid.

  Did you ever find yourself at odds with him over questions of politics?

  That is a difficult question. Where, after all, does character end and politics begin? At a personal level, I saw him as rather too fatalistic and therefore too passive. Did his mistrust of political activism express itself in passivity in the conduct of his life, or did an innate fatalism express itself in mistrust of political action? I cannot decide. But yes, at a personal level there was a certain tension between us. I wanted our relationship to grow and develop, whereas he wanted it to remain the same, without change. That was what caused the breach, in the end. Because between a man and a woman there is no standing still, in my view. Either you are going up or you are going down.

  When did the breach occur?

  In 1980. I left Cape Town and returned to France.

  Did you and he have no further contact?

  For a while he wrote to me. He sent me his books as they came out. Then the letters stopped coming. I presumed he had found someone else.

  And when you look back over the relationship, how do you see it?

  How do I see our relationship? John was a marked Francophile of the kind who believes that if he can acquire for himself a French mistress then supreme felicity will be his. Of the French mistress it will be expected that she recite Ronsard and play Couperin on the clavecin while simultaneously inducting her lover into the amatory mysteries, French style. I exaggerate, of course.

  Was I the French mistress of his fantasy? I doubt it very much. Looking back, I now see our relationship as comical in its essence. Comico-sentimental. Based on a comic premise. Yet with a further element that I must not minimize, namely, that he helped me escape from a bad marriage, for which I remain grateful to this day.

  Comico-sentimental…You make it sound rather light. Did Coetzee not leave a deeper imprint on you, and you on him?

  As to what imprint I may have left on him, that I am not in a position to judge. But in general I would say that unless you have a strong presence you do not leave a deep imprint; and John did not have a strong presence. I don’t mean to sound flippant. I know he had many admirers; he was not awarded the Nobel Prize for nothing; and of course you would not be here today, pursuing these researches, if you did not think he was important as a writer. But – to be serious for a moment – in all the time I was with him I never had the feeling I was with an exceptional person, a truly exceptional human being. It is a cruel thing to say, I know, but regrettably it is true. I experienced no flash of lightning from him that suddenly illuminated the world. Or if there were flashes, I was blind to them.

  I found John clever, I found him knowledgeable, I admired him in many ways. As a writer he knew what he was doing, he had a certain style, and in style lies the beginning of distinction. But he had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition. He was just a man, a man of his time, talented, maybe even gifted, but, frankly, not a giant. I am sorry if I disappoint you. From other people who knew him you will get a different picture, I am sure.

  Turning to his writings: speaking objectively, as a critic, what is your estimation of his books?

  I liked the early work best. In a book like In the Heart of the Country there is a certain daring, a certain wildness, that I can still admire. In Foe as well, which is not so early. But after that he became more respectable, and in my view more tame. After Disgrace I lost interest. I did not read the later stuff.

  In general I would say his work lacks ambition. Control over the elements of the fiction is too tight. You do not sense you are in the presence of a writer who is deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion, creative passion. That’s all.

  Interview conducted in Paris in January 2008.

  Notebooks: Undated fragments

  Undated fragment

  IT IS A SATURDAY afternoon in winter, ritual time for the game of rugby. With his father he catches a train to Newlands in time for the 2.15 curtain-raiser. The curtain-raiser will be followed at 4.00 by the main match. After the main match they will catch a train home again.

  He goes with his father to Newlands because sport – rugby in winter, cricket in summer – is the strongest surviving bond between them, and because it went through his heart like a knife, the first Saturday after his return to the country, to see his father put on his coat and without a word go off to Newlands like a lonely child.

  His father has no friends. Nor has he, though for a different reason. He had friends when he was younger; but these old friends are by now dispersed all over the world, and he seems to have lost the knack, or perhaps the will, to make new ones. So he is cast back on his father, as his father is cast back on him. As they live together, so on Saturdays they take their pleasure together. That is the law of the family.

  It surprised him, when he came back, to discover that his father knew no one. He had always thought of his father as a convivial man. But either he was wrong about that or his father has changed. Or perhaps it is simply one of the things that happen to men as they grow older: they withdraw into themselves. On Saturdays the stands at Newlands are full of them, solitary men in grey gabardine raincoats in the twilight of their lives, keeping to themselves as if their loneliness were a shameful disease.

  He and his father sit side by side on the north stand, watching the curtain-raiser. Over the day’s proceedings hangs an air of melancholy. This is the last season when the stadium will be used for club rugby. With the belated arrival of television in the country, interest in club rugby has dwindled away. Men who used to spend their Saturday afternoons at Newlands now prefer to stay at home and watch the game of the week. Of the thousands of seats in the north stand no more than a dozen are occupied. The railway stand is entirely empty. In the south stand there is still a bloc of diehard Coloured spectators who come to cheer for UCT and Villagers and boo Stellenbosch and Van der Stel. Only the grandstand holds a respectable number, perhaps a thousand.

  A quarter of a century ago, when he was a child, it was different. On a big day in the club competition – the day when Hamiltons played Villagers, say, or UCT played Stellenbosch – one would struggle to find standingroom. Within an hour of the final whistle Argus vans would be racing through the streets dropping off bundles of the Sports Edition for the vendors on the street corners, with eyewitness accounts of all the firstleague games, even the games played in far-off Stellenbosch and Somerset West, together with scores from the lesser leagues, 2A and 2B, 3A and 3B.

  Those days are gone. Club rugby is on its last legs. One can sense it today not just in the stands but on the field itself.
Depressed by the booming space of the empty stadium, the players seem merely to be going through the motions. A ritual is dying out before their eyes, an authentic petit-bourgeois South African ritual. Its last devotees are gathered here today: sad old men like his father; dull, dutiful sons like himself.

  A light rain begins to fall. Over the two of them he raises an umbrella. On the field thirty half-hearted young men blunder about, groping for the wet ball.

  The curtain-raiser is between Union, in sky-blue, and Gardens, in maroon and black. Union and Gardens are at the bottom of the firstleague table and in danger of relegation. It used not to be like that. Once upon a time Gardens was a force in Western Province rugby. At home there is a framed photograph of the Gardens third team as it was in 1938, with his father seated in the front row in his freshly laundered hooped jersey with its Gardens crest and its collar turned up fashionably around his ears. But for certain unforeseen events, World War II in particular, his father might even – who knows? – have made it into the second team.

  If old allegiances counted, his father would cheer for Gardens over Union. But the truth is, his father does not care who wins, Gardens or Union or the man in the moon. In fact he finds it hard to detect what his father cares about, in rugby or anything else. If he could solve the mystery of what in the world his father wants, he might perhaps be a better son.

  The whole of his father’s family is like that – without any passion that he can put a finger on. They do not even seem to care about money. All they want is to get along with everyone and have a bit of a laugh in the process.

  In the laughing department he is the last companion his father needs. In laughing he comes bottom of the class. A gloomy fellow: that must be how the world sees him, when it sees him at all. A gloomy fellow; a wet blanket; a stick in the mud.

  And then there is the matter of his father’s music. After Mussolini capitulated in 1944 and the Germans were driven north, the Allied troops occupying Italy, including the South Africans, were allowed to relax briefly and enjoy themselves. Among the recreations mounted for them were free performances in the big opera houses. Young men from America, Britain, and the far-flung British dominions across the seas, wholly innocent of Italian opera, were plunged into the drama of Tosca or The Barber of Seville or Lucia di Lammermoor. Only a handful took to it, but his father was among that handful. Brought up on sentimental Irish and English ballads, he was entranced by the lush new music and overwhelmed by the spectacle. Day after day he went back for more.